The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun. THURSDAY, DECEMBER 26, 1940. NAZI AIMS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 306, 26 December 1940, Page 6

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 26, 1940. NAZI AIMS.

For ihe cause that lacks ageietanoc, For the vyrong that reeds resistance, For the future in the dief nee, And the good that ice can do.

The Poles -were the first to feel the fall weight of the German war machine, and they are the 'principal victims of systematic Nazi terrorism. In the other occupied countries the German; are conscious of the fact that the war is not won, and that the .-nbject peoples are and will remain potentially dangerous unless and until Britain can be defeated. In these countries, then, the German aim is to keep the peoples quiet, to promote disunity among them, but not to deprive them of all hope or drive them to desperation. In Poland, far removed from direct aid by Britain, the Nazis do not feel the same necessity to dissemble their aims. They can do to the Poles what they will do to the other peoples if and when it becomes expedient. Hence the remarks of the Nazi governor of Poland need cause no surprise. In saying that the Poles have no other part in the seheme of things than that of toilers for their German masters, whose chief is "called upon to be the master of the world," he expressed exactly the aims of the. "new order," which the Nazis were planning even before they came to power. Special attention is given the Slavs, because of their fertility, which Hitler fears. As this fertility, in the Nazis' view, was increased by the splitting up of the large Polish estates among the peasants, it becomes "necessary" to detach the small Slav peasant from the land and transform him into a landless labourer, or an unskilled industrial worker.

The German governor's reference to the "liberty and religious rights" of the Poles ia characteristically cynical. Any "religious rights" allowed by the Nazis are allowed only as a means to an end. Hitler has explained it. "For our people," he said, "it is decisive whether they acknowledge the German Christ-creed with its effeminate pity—ethics, or a strong, heroic belief in God in Nature, God in our own people, in our own destiny, in our blood . . .

A. Genua Church, a German Christianity, is distortion. One is either a German or a Christian. You cannot be both." But, he went on, that did not mean that in Germany the churches need be eliminated. The aim would be to "preserve what can be preserved and change its meaning —Easter ia no longer resurrection, but the eternal renewal of our people. Christmas is the birth of our (the German) m saviour; the spirit of heroism and the freedom of our people... We shall compel them (the priests and ministers) to destroy their religions from within by setting aside all authority and reducing everything to pale, meaningless talk . . ." So the prospect before all Nazi-conquered peoples is not merely that of subordination, racially and economically, to the German master-class, it is also that of a subtle subversion and perversion of their religious faith. Not for nothing has the conviction spread and deepened that in fighting Hitler's Germany we are fighting against something much more evil than the Kaiser's Germany.